On Sep 17, 2004, at 1:00 PM, David Coppit wrote:
On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Ken Williams wrote:
I think you have a couple misconceptions about cpan-testers. It's not some organization with an office and some testing machines, it's just regular people out there who have set up robots to test all the CPAN releases they see (or that interest them).
Actually, in the last couple of days I've gotten email from something that
claims to be an automated testing service. (Sorry, but I deleted the
email.)
I believe those are "smokebots" that people have set up on their own machines though, not anything from the cpan-testers service itself. Notice that in the message you cited, the "From" address is "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", not something @testers.cpan.org.
The email you received should be archived at http://testers.cpan.org/ - if it's the grepmail distribution, that should be at http://testers.cpan.org/show/grepmail.html .
Overall, I'm just frustrated. I really do work hard on getting good
releases, and I give very detailed instructions on (1) installing
prerequisites, and (2) giving me enough info to debug test failures.
But these folks seem to think that if it doesn't install automatically, it
must be a module bug.
I do think it may be an issue with Module::Install, but I agree that without more information it's very hard to diagnose the actual problem. Have you tried writing directly to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to see if he/she can verify the prereqs, or run with TEST_VERBOSE=1?
You may get some good mileage out of making sure the tests say more about *why* they failed - your utilities in Test::Utils don't do very much reporting that will be visible to the user. You may be better off using Test::More, which has much of what you've created in Test::Utils, but with more visible reporting to the user (and into the cpan-testers email).
-Ken
